Nicolas Fränkel

It’s summer and since I’m hearing more and more the sound of waves splashing instead of the sound of keyboards typing, I’m providing you with quick tricks instead of well-though deep articles. This time, it’s about Swing. I’m doing Swing for a pet project…​ a lot. And I’m more of a web guy. So, I’m always butting my head against the wall trying to overcome problem people more experienced in Swing wouldn’t find a problem at all. This is

This article won’t be long but can be a lifesaver. If you use Maven, how many times did you need to manually update POM versions in an entire modules hierarchy? For me, the answer is: too many. When you project grows to include many Maven modules, releasing a new version can be a nightmare.

In one of my latest articles on +Context and Dependency Injection, one of the lessons I learned was to use factory methods in order to reduce the number of classes. In this article, I will go into the detail since I think it is of some importance. During school, you were probably taught to create a class for each component. For example, if your application has 4 buttons, North, East, South and West, you’ll have 4 classes.

Last month, I had to develop a Proof-of-Concept web application for a potential customer. Everything went fine, but at the end of the meeting, the customer asked 'Surely you will give us the demo so we can play with it further on our own'. I was pretty sure of my craft, so I had no problem about bugs and yet I gently refused anyway. Why so? Because I didn’t want to risk that my customer open the WAR and see how I made things happen.

In this article, I will provide you with the documentation to easily use the Flamingo framework and more precisely, its ribbon widget. Never say that Microsoft never innovates: in Office, it introduced an interesting concept, the ribbon band. The ribbon band is a toolbar of sort. But whereas toolbars are fixed, ribbons layout can change according to the width they display. If you have such an application, just play with it for a few seconds and you will see the magic happens

Sinced I dived into CDI, I explored classical Java EE uses. Then, I used CDI into a pet project of mine to see how it could be used in Swing applications. This article sums up what lessons I learned from itthis far. This article assumes you have some familiarity with CDI; if not, please read my previous articles on CDI (CDI an overview part 1 and part 2) or read the documentation. In my last attempts at Swing (I’m more of a web developer), I figured it could be nice to config

In the previous part of CDI, we saw some injection, qualifiers and scope. Now, it’s time to browse through more advanced features. Producers Previous examples cannot resolve all our use-cases. Some of these include: injection of random valuesinjection of context-dependent valuein general, places where the injection process cannot be narrowed down to a simple new() These hint at a very well-known pattern, the factory. Factories are implemented in JSR-299 as producers. Let’s tak

I may be a Spring fanboy but I’m also convinced a technology should embrace standards. Although Spring is now a de facto standard, it is in competition with other products, like Google Guice for example. It makes my work as an architect harder since my craft is to devise the most perennial solutions: standards are my allies in achieving this goal.